PR9: Regulation

By Connor Davidson

OFCOM• Ofcom stands for ‘The Office of Communications’. They are

based in the UK and is run by the government. They are approved regulatory and competition authority for broadcasting, telecom and postal industries. Ofcom have to represent the interests of citizens and consumers as a duty by increasing competition and also through protecting the pubic from offensive or harmful material. They have limitless power over various platforms such as radio and television, but also telecoms and postal divisions. A large percentage of major ranges of Ofcom lead to protection, rivalry, exploring, codes and more. For example, privateer radio station received abuse.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/

Dealing with an issue.• In 2008, an episode of ‘The Russel Brand Show’ was set to be broadcasted on

October 18th. The pre recorded show clearly infringed the broadcasting code and Ofcom were critical that no senior manager at Radio 2 had listened to the programme, before it was broadcast. In the calls, Ross and Brand left a number of humiliating and lewd messages on Andrew Sachs answer machine; one claiming that Brand had slept with his daughter.

• Ofcom fined the BBC £150,000 for broadcasting ‘gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning’ prank calls. £70,000 was fined for breaching ’generally accepted standards’ and 80,000 for breaking rules surrounding ‘adequate protection for members of the public from unwarranted infringements of privacy.

• The BBC received 45,000 following the incident, which forced Russel Brand, Lesley Douglas (controller of Radio 2) & David Barber (head of specialist music) all to resign; and Jonathon Ross to be suspended without pay for 12 weeks.

ASA• Asa is another regulatory body, which stands for Advertising

Standards Authority. ASA is the UK’s independent regulator of advertising across all media. They apply advertising codes, which are written by the committees of advertising practice. They act on complaints and proactively check the media to take action against misleading, harmful or offensive advertisements. ASA first made their move on setting up a committee of CAP in 1961 to outline the British code of advertising practice. In 1962, the business set up the Advertising Standards Authority to settle on dissensions that ads had broken the new code. ASA worked under a free chief who had no individual problems whilst working within the company. ASA is not funded by the British Government, yet rather by a duty of publicizing business.

https://www.asa.org.uk/?gclid=CJuFu6_uuMsCFc1uGwodA8QLIA

CRCA

• The commercial Radio Companies Association is the trade body for UK commercial radio. It is the representitive for commercial radio for the government, the radio authority, copyright social orders and other organisations concerned with radio. They manage the radio advertising clearance centre, which clears special and national category advertisements prior to broadcast. CRCA jointly owns the Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd with the BBC and was instrumental in the formation of the new Digital Radio Development Bureau.

PRS and MCPS

• PRS is a sequence, for example a chain of certain development malformations, one entailing the next.

• MCPS is known as a collecting society as their main role is collecting money from music users in the UK. These people record music into TV and radio programmes, websites, feature films, CD’s, records and so on.

• In 2013 PRS and MCPS-PRS Alliance realigned their brands and became PRS for music and MCPS.